Greg Burns will return as the secondary coach at USC, the school announced Monday.

Burns replaces Ronnie Bradford, who was among the several assistants to part ways with the Trojans last month in the aftermath of their first losing season in nearly two decades.

With the hiring, Coach Clay Helton has nine of his 10 on-field assistants in place for next fall.

Burns, 46, was previously the secondary coach on the Trojans’ 2003 and 2004 national championship teams. He coached 10 future NFL players during his four seasons on staff, including safeties Troy Polamalu and Darnell Bing who were both All-Americans. Polamalu went on to have an All-Pro career with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

When the Trojans won their second consecutive national championship in 2004, they ranked in the top-10 for both total defense and scoring defense.

Most recently, Burns had coached defensive backs at Oregon State, his seventh stop in 13 seasons since departing USC after 2005. The Beavers were 10th in the Pac-12 in pass defense this fall as they finished in last place in the Pac-12 North Division.

Burns joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL in 2006, where spent one season, before returning to college at Kansas State, followed by stints as a defensive backs coach at Purdue, Massachusetts, Cal and Oregon State, capping the nomadic stretch.

Burns is the first former Pete Carroll assistant to rejoin USC’s coaching staff since Ed Orgeron and Kennedy Polamalu were brought back under Lane Kiffin in 2010. Steve Sarkisian, a former offensive coordinator under Carroll, also returned as the head coach in 2014 until he was fired midway through his second season.

In his return, Burns will coach a young secondary that loses four of its five starters from last season, an exodus that includes seniors such as cornerback Iman Marshall and safety Marvell Tell. The lone returning starter is safety Talanoa Hufanga, who was a freshman and started half the season before suffering a broken collarbone in late October. They return eight scholarship defensive backs.

The Trojans were fifth in the Pac-12 in pass defense, and they intercepted only four passes, the fewest since the school began keeping statistics in 1955.

Joey Kaufman is the USC beat writer for the Southern California News Group. Since joining the Orange County Register in 2015, he has also covered Major League Baseball and UCLA athletics. His work has been recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors and Football Writers Association of America. Kaufman grew up in beautiful downtown Burbank.